NOEL FIELDING

DURING THE LAST DECADE OR SO NOEL FIELDING HAS BECOME A HOUSEHOLD NAME… NOT BAD FOR A POP CULTURE SURREALIST. HE’S BEEN A TEAM CAPTAIN ON THE ONE-TUBE-STOP-FROM-ANARCHIC MUSIC QUIZ NEVER MIND THE BUZZCOCKS, HALF OF SUPER-CULT THE MIGHTY BOOSH AND FRONTED BIZARRE REVUE SHOW LUXURY COMEDY….

Additional TV credits include THE IT CROWD and NATHAN BARLEY plus appearances in DOLL & EM, HOW NOT TO LIVE YOUR LIFE, GARTH MARENGHI’S DARKPLACE and SURREALISSIMO: THE TRIAL OF SALVADOR DALI. He’s also co-presented COMIC RELIEF DOES TOP OF THE POPS and has appeared as guest team captain on THE BIG FAT QUIZ OF THE YEAR. His film credits include the BAFTA nominated SWEET, BUNNY AND THE BULL and HORRID HENRY: THE MOVIE. He’s had two collections of his artwork – PSYCHEDELIC DREAMS OF THE JELLY FOX and BRYAN FERRY VS. THE JELLY FOX – exhibited in Soho and, in 2011, released an art-book of paintings, drawings and photography – SCRIBBLINGS OF A MADCAP SHAMBLETON…

Hot on the heels of a successful first leg Fielding has extended his live UK tour, AN EVENING WITH NOEL FIELDING. The second leg of dates will begin on 12th November and wrap up on 13th December 2015. Expect a magical mix of Fielding’s unique brand of stand-up comedy, live animation, music and his best-known characters… In this new interview with The Mouth Magazine, Fielding talks about the tour, reflects on the nature of fame and reveals how Spike Milligan and Vic & Bob were a huge influence…

YOU’RE IN LONDON, TODAY – IN THIS HEAT… HOW’S THAT WORKING OUT FOR YOU?
Yeah, I’m in Highgate. It’s nice. I’m right by Hampstead Heath, so it’s beautiful. I’ve got all the windows open in my house. There’s a nice cool breeze coming through… Couple of builders opposite on some scaffolding, chatting to each other using some colourful language. It’s all happening, here!

TYPICAL HIGHGATE…
Ha ha, yeah – a normal Hampstead day. It’s pretty big! Anyway, sorry for being a little bit late calling you… I’ve just been doing another interview and it overran a bit.

YOU’RE NOT DOING THEM ALL DAY ARE YOU?
No, I’ll only do two at a time – ‘cos I talk so much and they all end up overrunning a bit, and that all knocks on so you end up with a pile-up. If you arrange, like, six then it ends up taking so much longer than it should…

… AND BEFORE YOU KNOW IT, IT’S NEXT WEDNESDAY…
Yeah! And after a while talking about yourself all the time drives you mad anyway. An hour is enough, for me. And the only way out of the madness is if they put you in a monastery. Put you in a shroud and force you to take a vow of silence.

TOM BAKER DID THAT, YOU KNOW? WENT INTO A MONASTERY IN JERSEY AND TRAINED TO BE A MONK… I HASTEN TO ADD THIS WAS QUITE A LONG TIME BEFORE HE BECAME DOCTOR WHO…
It was two weeks. Ha ha. Two weeks before. He was a monk, then he went off somewhere for a minute to find some mead and he became DOCTOR WHO… It turned out he was alright at it! Ha ha. He was the best Doctor though, wasn’t he, Tom Baker..?

HE WAS. THEY’VE ALL HAD SOMETHING BUT HE WAS… BEYOND COMPARE, WASN’T HE?
Yeah. Absolutely brilliant… I love DOCTOR WHO but I haven’t really watched that much of the new series since it came back, actually. Who is it playing the Doctor at the minute?

IT’S PETER CAPALDI…
… Is it?! Peter Capaldi! Wow! Well, there you go…

I’VE SOMETIMES THOUGHT YOU MIGHT MAKE A GOOD DOCTOR WHO…
Ha ha. You know what? Once or twice people have put me on those sort of ‘fantasy lists’ for that. But I actually think Julian would be a better Doctor. He’s more sensible. I could be the assistant who clears off and gets him into trouble every week…

… YOU DO A GOOD LINE IN RUNNING DOWN CORRIDORS SCREAMING?
Yeah! I do! Actually, I really could do that. Seriously, I’d love to play a villain on that programme. Really… I would…

I’M GOING TO E-MAIL STEVEN MOFFATT RIGHT AFTER THIS AND TELL HIM YOU’VE SAID THAT.
Ha ha. Do it! I met his wife the other day, actually.

SUE VERTUE. THE TV PRODUCER…
I met her at Wimbledon. I went to Wimbledon… God, this sounds like I’m leading some incredibly glamorous celebrity life and we have big days out together to the tennis. It’s not like that usually! I love tennis, so I went to Wimbledon. It was good but it was the first day and it was a bit like no-one was quite into it, really… I wish I’d gone yesterday.

WHAT A DAY! DUSTIN BROWN BEAT RAFA NADAL…
… I know! I know! I watched that game. It was unbelievable, wasn’t it? But the thing with Rafa Nadal is, you always feel a bit sorry for him if he loses, don’t you? He’s a doctor isn’t he?

… MAYBE THE NEXT DOCTOR WHO!
Ha, yeah! I think he’s a qualified doctor. He’s got a beautiful wife. And he’s one of the greatest tennis players ever. Then he loses one game and you still feel sorry him. You go “Aww, poor Rafa”… But he’ll be fine, I’m sure. He might bounce back, I think. Ha ha…

HE’S A GREAT PLAYER – I LOVE WATCHING HIM.
Me too. Actually I’m trying to write a film. But it’s not happening. I’m finding it too hard now Wimbledon’s on… ‘cos I end up going “Ooh, Nadal” or “Ooh, Andy Murray”, and then “Ah, alright. I’ll write something tomorrow instead”… Ha ha – we can’t talk about tennis all day can we? The Mouth Magazine isn’t a tennis magazine…

.. WELL, IT COULD BE AFTER THIS…
Ha ha. Yeah!

WE’D BETTER CRACK ON AND TALK ABOUT YOUR TOUR LATER THIS YEAR. THERE’S A SURREALISM IN YOUR COMEDY, AN ABSURDITY, AND I WAS THINKING ABOUT THAT BEFORE YOU CALLED… IF THERE’S THE CHANCE THAT ANYTHING CAN GO OFF IN ANY DIRECTION AT ANY MOMENT, YOU MUST ACTUALLY HAVE INCREDIBLE SELF-DISCIPLINE TO KEEP HOLD OF THE REIGNS…
Well, you say that… Have you seen LUXURY COMEDY? Ha ha… That’s basically what happens if I don’t work with Julian. I just go “What about this? And what about that? And what about this?”… Ideas all the time. Too many ideas, maybe? But I’m sort of free in that way, Julian would sort of pin stuff down a bit more. I don’t really have… erm… Well, there’s this brilliant quote to do with the MONTY PYTHON. Terry Jones said “Wouldn’t it be brilliant if there were lots of Queen Victorias having a race, a horse race, jumping over fences and stuff. Everyone dressed as Queen Victoria”… And John Cleese said “Yes… But why?”… Ha ha. So they made it the Queen Victoria Handicap race or whatever. It was brilliant but he was right, you know? You can have this beautiful imagery but if you’ve got a reason for it as well then, you know… You get a double whammy.

THERE’S GOT TO BE AN INTERNAL LOGIC…
Well, The Boosh was always a story, it always had that internal logic, you know? But after that I just wanted to let off a colourful firework. An explosion of, sort of, shards from my brain. Just something with none of that stuff – no discipline. In a way I suppose that made LUXURY COMEDY quite tough viewing, ha ha. Some of it even I can’t watch ‘cos it’s too insane. That’s what I needed to do at that time. Just get some stuff out and make it really weird and really mental.

DOES IT TAKE LONG TO WRITE THAT STUFF?
It takes a lot longer than you might think to write something in a weird way. It took a long time to write the second series of LUXURY COMEDY ‘cos we ended up putting a story in there – trying to impose some rules. But really that’s what Luxury should never have been, you know? We should have made a weirder show than the first series. We should have kept pushing it.

THE TWO SERIES OF LUXURY COMEDY WERE TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN, BUT THERE WAS QUITE A DIFFERENT VIBE ABOUT EACH…
Yeah. There was. But I think what happened was we’d invented all those characters – and there were some good ones. But if we’d had really strong discipline we probably would have taken New York Cop, Fantasy Man, the more successful ones… ‘cos you know when you’re writing them which are the ones that are going to be strong, before you’ve even shown anyone… We probably should have explored those characters a bit more, you know? But, in a way, what I was trying to do was be completely free.

THERE WAS A LOT TO IT – THE ANIMATION AND SO ON…
It was as much about the animation as it was about the comedy, really. It was about coming up with a visual style and the colours and using the techniques of animation as much as it was about the writing, really. But I realised on Luxury that sometimes the more visual something is the more the jokes get hidden, you know? The simpler you can film something, it works better for the comedy. But I’m glad I did it, ha ha ha ha…

WHAT MIGHT YOUR NEXT THING BE LIKE, THEN?
I’d like the next thing I do to be completely different. It’s weird, really. We had a lot of practise with The Boosh. We did it live, we did three Edinburgh Fringe shows, then we did a radio show. By the time we came to do the TV show we’d been working together for five years already. Sort of honing our vision. Julian’s very into story and film. And I’m very into the imagery, the visuals of it. And dialogue, actually. I’m really into dialogue. I’m good with dialogue and character. So I think Julian and I had the perfect match for each other – in as much as we were always pulling apart but where it landed in the middle always worked, really… It worked for both of us, for what we both wanted, for what we both did.

DID YOU MISS JULIAN’S INPUT ON LUXURY COMEDY?
The thing I missed the most was that Julian’s a great performer as well. He can really hold the screen. He can really carry the story, you know? He’s such a strong performer. My character was quite away with the fairies and quite… childlike, in a way. So it was harder for me to have to be the one saying “Right, what are we gonna do?” – it was better for Julian to say that… And for me to answer “Well, we could make some cheese sandwiches and roll about the floor”, ha ha… And he’d say “Well, that’s not gonna get the job done is it?” and he’s better at saying “We’ve got to do this because I need to be a famous writer” or “I need to get this girl” or whatever… The double act was good because everything was filtered through that and we’re just two normal dudes as well. So people related to us. “Oh, that’s how me and my mates speak” or “They’re carrying us through this really weird adventure but they’re quite normal”… So, I think in LUXURY COMEDY all of that was probably too undiluted… Undiluted madness, ha ha…

I THINK THERE’S AN ELEMENT OF SUBSCRIPTION TO WHAT YOU DO… A BIT LIKE, YOU KNOW, SPECIAL EFFECTS IN FILMS OR… DOCTOR WHO… OR WHATEVER. YOU’RE WELL AWARE SOMETHING IS AN ABSURD STORY OR MADE WITH SPECIAL EFFECTS – BUT YOU HAVE TO SUSPEND DISBELIEF SO THAT YOU CAN ENJOY IT… IF YOU DON’T DO THAT YOU’D JUST SIT THERE PICKING HOLES IN IT… SO WITH YOUR STUFF YOU HAVE TO TOTALLY SUBSCRIBE TO THE UNREALITY TO FIND THE REALITY… IF YOU WON’T DO THAT THEN YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO ‘GET IT’, ARE YOU?
Oh, that’s interesting. An interesting thing to say… Hmm.

SO HOW DOES THAT PLAY OUT IN AN AUDIENCE SITUATION?
I think live what actually happens is that you’re able to play two games. You can present the stuff that’s a bit weird but you can also step outside of it and go “Well that was a bit weird, wasn’t it? That didn’t really make sense!” or “This next bit doesn’t really make sense so I’m going to say it quite fast”… Ha ha… you can do that and people will go “Oh, right… They’re not taking it seriously either!” and that’s like a release. Once you let the audience know that you’re not taking it seriously either then they can relax, they can go “Okay!”… I think that sometimes people tend to think you’re being incredibly serious about it.

THERE WAS NO STUDIO AUDIENCE FOR LUXURY COMEDY…
No. That’s quite strange, for comedy. There’s no audience there laughing so it becomes like some weird play. Some Eugène Ionesco play or something, ha ha. It’s difficult to penetrate. One of the reasons, in THE MIGHTY BOOSH, that we came out in front of the curtain at the start of the show and said, you know, “Hi… On this show you’re going to be seeing…” or Julian would say “I’m going to be doing some great acting in this show” and I’d say “And also, I have the legs of a rat”… When you do that, when you’re talking directly to the audience like that, you’re sort of letting them know that you’re not taking it that seriously. They can then… erm… they know what level to come in at…

SO MAYBE PEOPLE STRUGGLED TO KNOW WHAT LEVEL THEY SHOULD COME IN AT, WITH LUXURY COMEDY?
Yeah. And also there were just too many things in it, really! It was a half sitcom / half sketch show. There were characters there that you never saw again, characters that you did see again… It was all pretty much for the… sort of… hardcore… surrealists… gang. Ha ha… I don’t think that THE LAST OF THE SUMMER WINE people were ever going to get anything much out of it…

THEY MIGHT HAVE DONE, IN THEIR NURSING HOME BEDS DOSED UP ON MORPHINE…
Ha ha, yeah, true, ha ha… There’s a couple of episodes from the first series that I like, and a couple from the second. But there’s a few where I go “Oh my God, I can’t watch this, it’s too insane”. You know what, we got this amazing review. We got this review for it, written by an older guy at THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, that said “Just let it wash over you and you can enjoy it, enjoy the jokes and the visuals. Don’t be uptight about it. You can watch it when you’re half drunk”, ha ha… I thought that was the best review that we got, ‘cos in a way we didn’t know what we were making at all. I had no idea what we were making even when we were making it. Even after we’d made it and I watched it I still didn’t know what we’d made, ha ha… In a way that’s quite ’70s isn’t it, that? The idea that some TV channel would say “Just go crazy”. It was amazing that I was allowed to do that. But you live and learn…

YOU JUST MENTIONED THE 1970S… WE’RE ABOUT THE SAME AGE, SO I GUESS IF WE’RE LOOKING FOR A LINE BACK THROUGH YOUR STUFF WE COULD GO TO VIC AND BOB… THEN BACK TO SPIKE MILLIGAN IN THE 1970S… ALL OF THAT IMAGINATION AND INTELLIGENCE DIRECTED TOWARDS CREATING SOMETHING COMPLETELY BIZARRE…
I got into Milligan a bit later, but he was always around wasn’t he? He was one of those people who, when you were a kid, you knew his name ‘cos he had such an unusual name. You knew who he was from chat shows and children’s books and stuff like that. He seemed to be omnipresent because you’d have a children’s book and you’d go “Oh, my dad’s got a Spike Milligan record” or he’d be on PARKINSON or something. Or he was always out doing stuff, fronting some cause for rhinos. So you were aware of him. I don’t think I knew what he did. Well, THE GOONS you knew. That was the other thing. That felt like it was from the sort of black-and-white times. THE GOONS is one of my favourite things. It’s astonishing. Genius writing. There’s always one bit in every episode where you go “Wow, what an idea!”… In the first episode there’s a joke where he talks about Neddie Seagoon swimming in the sea and heading for the shore… and he says “As Neddie swam for the shore he dried himself off to save time”, ha ha… I love that. It’s genius. But Spike Milligan in the ’70s… You’d go “Is that the same guy ‘cos he’s got a white beard now and he’s quite freaky?”…

HIS SHOW Q WAS QUITE SOMETHING, TOO…
Yeah. Q isn’t that different to LUXURY COMEDY in a way. It’s sort of baffling and you go “I’m not sure if I like all of this, it’s a bit frightening. I don’t know what’s happening”… And in a weird way you go “Who let him make that?” – it’s so free. He was big, he was big. A huge influence on me, really. And Vic and Bob…

VIC REEVES’ BIG NIGHT OUT AND THE SMELL OF REEVES AND MORTIMER AND ALL THAT…
Yeah, I was the right age for Vic and Bob. I went to see them at Hammersmith when I was at school, or maybe sixth form college or something. I was obsessed with them. I have to be honest, though – I didn’t really get their show at first. I watched one and thought “What’s this?” – but right at the end they did this one joke that I loved and I thought “Hmmm. I’ll watch that again next week”… You had to wait a week…

A WHOLE WEEK!
Yeah! You’d go “Oh my God! A week!”… You were a kid at school, or at sixth form or whatever. Or maybe I was a little bit older, I might have been doing my foundation… But you’d watch it and then the next day you’d all talk about it, wouldn’t you? Telly was quite important, wasn’t it? If you missed it there was not really a way of getting it again. You had to wait for the video or the DVD or whatever to come out, unless one of your friends had recorded it. That made it quite sacred. It gave it a lot of power, didn’t it? Whereas these days you just go “I missed that. Not bothered – it’ll be on the internet, I’ll download it”… Or your mate’s recorded it, or “There’ll be a DVD out in ten minutes anyway”… In those days television had power and you knew if you missed it, the ‘thing’, everyone would be talking about it and you’d be… just sat there.

WHEN YOU AND JULIAN DID THAT WITH THE MIGHTY BOOSH – WHEN YOU CREATED IT AND IT EVENTUALLY BECAME THE CULT PROGRAMME – WERE YOU… SURPRISED?What happens is you make a cult show, a weird cult show and… I mean, I always thought that it might get through. First and foremost the double act was strong with us, you know? It just always worked whether we were on stage together or we were on screen together. We were very lucky, ‘cos those things are one in a million. It was ridiculous. I’ve worked with lots of people who I just don’t have that ‘thing’ with. There’s something about what we do together that just works. It’s out of our control. I didn’t know how big it would get, but I always knew that we were going to get somewhere with it… Definitely, yeah.

THE MIGHTY BOOSH BECAME A PHENOMENON… YOU PLAYED WEMBLEY!
Yeah. It got stupid. It got stupid at one point. Really, we just did a show on BBC3, you know? Some weird little show. And then we were playing massive places and hanging out with Robin Williams and Jack Black and… it got ludicrous. It got so big at one point, I remember we were on the cover of TIME OUT and we were doing the Jonathan Ross thing that night – we were guests and we were the band – and we were doing the O2 that night as well. It was, like, really stupid considering it’s such an odd show.

DID ALL OF THAT CAUSE PROBLEMS?
Everyone wanted to get involved. We looked like we were having quite good fun, that we were quite a good gang to be in. So everyone wanted to take us out. When you get quite famous in this country you realise that you could go to a party every single night and get free stuff, people want to hang out with you, girls chat you up all the time. It’s just insane… It’s like it’s your birthday. All the time. Every day. For about two years, ha ha…

HOW DID YOU BOTH… COPE?
I think what happens is… Well, Julian retreats like a hermit. I think his way of dealing with it was to just never go out. Both of us are quite shy, a little bit. We don’t like massive amounts of attention outside of the show. We don’t mind when we’re getting it as performers but neither of us want to be the centre of attention outside of the show. So when you’re the centre of attention at every party you go to… you know, it’s… erm… My way of dealing with it was to get drunk to block it out, ha ha. So you can go to all those parties and you can be a bit ruder. You can sort of retreat into your own world a little bit, when you’re off your face.

YOU WERE PRETTY KEEN ON, YOU KNOW, HEARING THE SOUND OF YOUR FRONT DOOR SLAMMING BEHIND YOU…
Yeah. I did have a really good time going out for about two years. It is fun while it happens. I’m glad I did it. I got to meet all these insane people. I got to hang out with Courtney Love and go partying with Kate Moss… You do all that business but then you see it for what it is. You realise “I’ve got to stop this – I can’t get any work done”. It’s ridiculous… It’s just a party. It’s just another place. It’s just more people…

‘ALONE BUT IN A CROWD’ SORT OF THING?
Yeah. You go to a party and you get ‘in’ with the ‘in crowd’and you go to a ‘backstage’ section of the club that’s for the ‘in crowd’… Then there’s another section that’s like ‘backstage backstage’ and there’s only, like, seven people there and they’re all really cool. Then there’s another even cooler room that you didn’t know about, but eventually you get in there and… you’re on your own. You’re in a room going “Is this actually any good?”, ha ha… You sort of start to miss the times you had with your friends, proper friends, when you just went down the pub or went to the park or something. That gets taken away from you and it’s a shame. You lose your… privacy.

HAVE YOU GOT THAT BACK NOW?
When I go to a different country, that’s when I get it back. I love just walking around, shopping or just hanging out. And I can do that if I go to France or LA… Los Angeles is nice because a few people know me but it’s not that many. It’s not, you know, a million selfies a day like it can be here…

AH, CELEBRITY SELFIES…
It’s just the times we live in. Everyone’s got a camera on their phone haven’t they, now? And I think at the moment we seem to celebrate the celebrity in a weird way. There’s a lot of celebrities too – it’s become quite disposable, the whole cycle of it.

IT’S THE WARHOL THING…
It is! it is! The fifteen minutes! Yeah… It’s crazy. But really my fans are pretty obsessive and pretty full on. They’re also amazing as well. I never turn a photo down. Ever. I really don’t mind it. If I’m in a pub and there’s forty people want a photo I’ll do it. I’ll do forty photos. I’m not one of those who’s just gonna say “No”. It’s amazing to be able to do it, but there is a downside when it happens. If you’re out with your friends you don’t really get to speak with them, or the whole thing can become a bit of a hassle for them. It’s tricky… But, you know, you just do it – because the people asking are the people who come to see you or buy your DVDs and being nice to them for a few seconds is part of it.

IT’S A NICE THING TO DO – IT’S A REALLY IMPORTANT THING FOR SOME PEOPLE, JUST TO MAKE THAT FEW SECONDS OF CONNECTION, GET THAT PHOTO…
It is, yeah. I saw a member of Kiss when I was in Australia – Ace Frehley, the original guitarist, who I love. I chased him in the airport and I asked for a picture and he said “No”. I was so gutted. Me and my tour manager are big fans and we’d chased him and we were like “Oh my God! It’s Ace Frehley”… But he said “No” and carried on walking. We were like two kids who’d been told off. And then, funnily enough, some kids came up to me and went “Can we get a photo?” and I’m, like, “Ab-so-lutely”… That feeling you have when you meet someone you really love and they’re a little bit rude to you is… Do you know what? Actually, he wasn’t rude. He was well within his rights to say “No”, and I still love him. But I was gutted and it was like someone had taken all the air out of me. It’s such a weird feeling when you try and connect with someone and they say “No”. I don’t turn down photos anyway, but just then I thought “I’m never ever turning down a photo”…

YOU’RE PUBLIC PROPERTY, IN A WAY? IT’S, AS YOU SAY, ANOTHER FACET TO YOUR JOB…
Of course, yeah. But the downside of that is that you have to shut yourself away and go to places where you don’t get hassled and don’t get that all the time – otherwise you’d go mad. But then you live this weird life where you end up hanging out with other people who are in the same situation, and you end up ‘backstage backstage’ and you’re not having a real experience of anything anymore, you know? I used to love going to gigs and going down the front and hanging out. Now I have to watch it off from the side or whatever. So it’s weird. You lose a lot of stuff that you really did enjoy… I’m not complaining. The upside of being famous is brilliant. Everything just becomes different, really.

HAVE YOU WRITTEN ABOUT FAME FOR THE STAND-UP SHOW? OR ARE THERE OTHER THINGS THAT YOU WANTED TO TALK ABOUT?
I wanted to talk about being 40, actually, ‘cos that’s quite a big thing for me. I couldn’t believe that I’d got into my forties. Julian said something brilliant about it. He said “When you get to 40, it’s like someone drops a boulder on you”… Ha ha… “But then after that – 41, 42, 43 – they’re pebbles”… Ha ha… They’re mere pebbles that don’t even affect you. You get to 40 and you go “How has this happened?” – so I talk a bit about that. That was the big thing I wanted to talk about. I think I just wanted to do some stand-up. I haven’t really done that much stand-up, not for a while, and I wanted to get back to doing that. It was really good fun. I wrote some stuff I was really pleased with… and then some stuff that was really weird, really abstract, that I was very pleased with… I’ve got about forty minutes of stand-up…

THAT’S A SHORT SHOW!
Yeah! Goodnight! Whenever I go see someone live – this is just for me personally – I love stand-up for about fifty minutes and then I need something else, you know? Unless it’s Richard Pryor or Steve Martin or Robin Williams, you know, firing stuff at you. There are people who can do it for two hours and you’re captivated. But, for me, even if they’re really good most stand-ups can only manage about forty minutes before I’d quite like them to change it up. Also, I quite like travelling around. Like, with The Boosh it was a gang – almost like we were in a band, you know? Like a circus. You never get bored. It’s nice, it’s like a family…

SO TOURING SOLO IS… NOT LIKE THAT?
Well, my brother’s in the show and my friend Tom and we’ve got our Australian tour manager and… there is a gang of us. We have a tour bus and a driver and we have this guy making a documentary, filming it all. So we have a little gang again, which I really love. So, in the show, there’s a few sketches and some music and there’s some live animation on stage. Then there’s an interval and in the second half there’s a bit of narrative. I get kidnapped and New York Cop comes out to try and interrogate the audience, so I come out in character and improvise with the crowd for a bit. And eventually, at the end, we bring someone on stage and put them in an animation and they end up saving the day…

SOMEONE FROM THE AUDIENCE?
Yeah. They become the hero of the show, ha ha. So it’s quite a weird show but it’s got a lot of different elements to it. It’s a fun show, it’s hard to get bored. The rule was that you didn’t have to have seen LUXURY COMEDY or THE MIGHTY BOOSH to know what anything was. You should be able to enjoy this show whether you’ve seen those or not. The characters in it are all explained. New York Cop is a policeman – it doesn’t make much difference if you know who he is or not. Fantasy Man, we set him up as a hero, a kind of Don Quixote figure. Archetypal. The characters in the show are either new characters or archetypal – like The Moon from The Boosh. The Moon is the moon, you know? Ha ha. We’ve stuck the best elements of Luxury, the more accessible ones, and hopefully it’s accessible to anyone.

SO HOW HAS IT BEEN GOING?
It’s been going really well, actually. It went really well in Australia – it got better in Australia than it was in the first part of the English tour. Just by doing it over and over again you get new jokes and you work out how to lose those bits that aren’t quite working. We’re quite a way into it now, so by the time of the UK tour it should be really ready. At its peak. Before we kill it. Before we chop its head off… Ha ha ha ha…

Noel Fielding tours the UK in November / December 2015. Dates and tickets here